Fall Back Position

My friend Annette sent me a YouTube clip the other day. “It’s about 45 minutes long, but it’s totally worth it,” she said.

            Given that my attention span is normally the same period of time it takes for a dream to die, I told her I seriously doubted it.

            “Just watch it, lah! Aiyoh!” she said. As I later said to Amanda, if Annette’s eyes had rolled any further back, she’d have been blind.

            “So did you watch it?” Amanda asked. In response, I tapped my phone and forwarded Annette’s clip.

            When Saffy came back from her pedicure humming a mangled version of ‘Despacito’, Amanda was still sitting in front of her laptop at the dining table, staring slack-jawed at the screen.

            “Watcha watching?” Saffy said, coming around to Amanda side. “Why are you watching a half-naked Indian man on…Oh. My. God! What is he doing?” she screamed.

            “Will you please stop screaming? It’s just Iyengar!”

            “What is that? Oh my God! How is he doing that? Why is he half-naked?” Saffy moaned, clearly too traumatised to be able to process too much information at the same time. She immediately pulled up a chair next to Amanda and sat down.

            “He’s practically folded his body backwards over his leg!” Saffy pointed out. “How is he doing that? Really, could someone please tell him to put a shirt on? This is so disturbing!”

            “This is how the yogis practise yoga!” Amanda told her.

            Saffy’s bosom puffed out to such a volume, it threatened to obstruct Amanda’s view of the laptop screen. “This is yoga? No way is this yoga! I mean….oh God….look! He’s just wrapped both legs over his head! Oh…I can’t watch this….I swear, if his thing pops out of his loin cloth, I am going to just die!”

            Later that night, over a dinner at the newly renovated Chomp Chomp, it was all the girls could talk about.

            “Is that not the most disturbing thing you’ve ever seen?” Saffy asked me.

            “Actually, I thought it was quite life-changing,” I replied. “For the first time in my life, I finally got a sense of what yoga actually means!”

            “Totally!” Amanda said, stabbing a piece of cucumber out of the rojak. “I loved what he said how his body was in a million pieces, but his mind was whole!”

            “You guys are seriously strange,” Saffy huffed. “That was not normal, what I saw. No one should be able to twist and turn like that!”

            “If you practise enough, it should!” Amanda said serenely. “And that’s the whole point, you have to let the body break complete. That’s how the mind heals itself!”

            “I don’t see how that can be true,” Saffy said firmly. “I mean, how damaged must my mind be if it has to be healed by me literally looking at my ass from the other direction?”

            Of course, that’s the trouble with YouTube. You can never just look at one video any more than you can have just one version of ‘Despacito’. There’s always another clip to look at. Which is how we all eventually came to watch ‘Primary Series Ashtanga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois’.

            “So, who’s this dude?” Saffy wanted to know as we all settled in with a tube of Pringles to watch the clip that Amanda had started streaming onto our AppleTV. “And is Ashtanga different from Iyengar?”

            “I’m too lazy to Google it,” I told her. “Which in and of itself is so encouraging as it must mean my mind is already in a million pieces, so I’m halfway there to having a complete mind!”

            If watching Iyengar go through his postures was depressing, watching Sri K. Pattabhi Jois teach Ashtanga made Saffy positively suicidal.

            “Why are they always half naked?” she complained within two minutes of the clip. “And how are these students able to just float like that?”

            “Look how they can touch their whole palms on the ground!” Amanda said with deep admiration. “I have to really strain to touch my toes, and this is after years of very expensive classes at Como Shambhala!”

            “I don’t think they eat anything,” Saffy concluded. “Look at their stomachs! They must have zero body fat! Maybe that’s how they can touch their toes, Amanda. There’s no fat to get in the way!”

            Amanda turned toward Saffy. “Are you saying I have fat?” she said stiffly.

            “If you keep putting away Pringles like that, you sure will!” Saffy huffed.

            Amanda says that in her ongoing journey towards true spirituality, the fact that she hasn’t smothered Saffy in her sleep must count for something.